With the arrival of digital video technology and economical hardware, new applications are conceived and deployed with increasing regularity. Digitizing video signals enables remote and selective monitoring of one or more video signals, and economical hardware increases the range of problems for which the technology is suitable for applications.
Some digital video applications involve multiple personnel monitoring selected ones of a number of video signals. In these applications, the number of personnel is usually less than the number of video signals, processor-based control allows concurrent display of one or more video signals at a display terminal, and each person monitors and controls the display at one or more display terminals. For example, 4 people may be assigned the task of monitoring the video signals from a dozen or more sources, wherein each person can select for display at a display terminal one or more of the video signals. It will be appreciated that such systems have use in security, military, aviation, traffic, environmental and many other applications.
The particular requirements related to weight limits, modularity, and fail-safe operations present many challenges for designers of video distribution system. For example in a distributed architecture, workstations with powerful hardware and complex software may perform functions related to digitizing video signals and controlling the distribution and display of the video data. The distributed architecture may be excessive in terms of cabling if weight is a consideration and may be unduly complicated if modularity is a consideration. Another challenge involves adapting custom designed video distribution systems and applications to use commercial off the shelf (COTS) parts versus custom designed parts. Many manufacturers prefer to manufacture high volume parts and charge a premium to provide low volume, custom parts. To further complicate the situation for system designers, the output pin resources provided by COTS parts are also reduced at a time when system users are demanding that the video distribution system support more video channels. A system and a method that addresses the aforementioned problems, as well as other related problems, are therefore desirable.